The compact automatic rifle that Stalin’s engineers unveiled in 1947
didn’t look like much of a gun. The result of a secret design contest,
its components were simple, inelegant, workmanlike. Its ammunition
lacked the stopping power of other rifle cartridges. Its barrel was too
short to achieve the range of standard infantry rifles. When the
Pentagon finally got its hands

on a few of the weapons in the 1950s, officials scoffed. But from this
unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun—dubbed the
Avtomat Kalashnikova-47—would become one of the most recognizable
artifacts of the 20th century.